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Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields: 'I used to live in a commune where music was forbidden'

As he releases Quickies, an LP of minature gems, the master songwriter contemplates a pop song’s perfect length – and whether Covd-19 has ended his career

Stephin Merritt has just spent six weeks confined to his Manhattan apartment after contracting coronavirus. He was ill for 10 days, then recovered. He’s usually a crazily prolific songwriter – two of his band’s most celebrated albums, 50 Song Memoir and 69 Love Songs, obviously contain 119 songs between them – but he hasn’t come up with any new numbers for Magnetic Fields since he got ill. The problem is that he can only write songs in bars. And not just any bar – it needs to be “one-third full of cranky old gay men gossiping over thumping disco music”. Plus he needs a glass of cognac, to be slowly sipped, and a corner with a light so he can see his notebook.

Fortunately, before the outbreak, he was able to find a place that fulfilled these conditions and the result is the Magnetic Fields’ latest album. Like most of Merritt’s records, there’s a concept – on this one, titled Quickies, all the songs but one are two minutes 15 seconds or less. However, that’s not an unusual length for a Magnetic Fields tune – as Merritt points out over the phone, one-third of the songs on 69 Love Songs would qualify.

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